Scott Johnson

The actual freedom of choice there is excellent. And I'm really glad they're doing that. Because it's one of my favorite new features of the game for a very long time. But I also think there is some value in giving people a choice, especially if they're used to doing a certain thing. So watch for that. You also have cross-realm guilds. We've been filling ours up pretty quick.

In fact, I think we kind of hit... Maximum already. I need Blizzard to take away, like back in 2010, the rumors at the time were that our guild was partly responsible for this, but they made guilds smaller. They put a cap of a thousand per guild. And it was because ours was like nine or 10,000. It was unwieldy and it was kind of hard to deal with for them.

I don't know why it was for them, but, but then how we handle data has maybe changed or whatever. My guess is this isn't a problem now. So I think they should drop the limit and we should be able to make a gigantic guild again without any problems.

instead of getting on it yeah all these separate guilds it's hard but cross realm guilds are happening that means that you are no longer limited to one server it also means you are no longer limited to one faction so if you've got some folks yeah on the alliance you want to bring into your guild you can do it this would have been dude this would have been like swearing in church about 10 years ago

Did that surprise you when they changed it? Because it shocked me. I was like, whoa.

I should mention, this is a great time to mention this, because I also agree the retail game's in the best shape it's been in a very long time. Some of you at home are going, wait, what about Classic? You guys going to talk about Classic on this show? Yes, the answer is yes. It's just that there's nothing huge happening right this second in Classic. And you know what?

Someone's going to write in and go, are you kidding me? This thing they just did was huge. I get it. There's stuff happening in Classic. I'm not playing Classic. I'm not that interested in Classic. It doesn't mean we won't cover Classic stuff. We will.

That's good for the show. I mean, just from the baseline, why I don't care to play classic is because I've played all of this a lot. I've played since 2003. It's a long time to play a game. And I'm more interested in what's new and less in what's old. And I love... Trust me, I'm a nostalgic guy. I have a whole other podcast about classic gaming.

And hell, Warcraft about to hit 20 puts it in that category. Sure. But... I find it just, I find it jarring and hard to be in and I've tried. So it doesn't mean that I'm representative of some of a whole bunch of people. I'm sure some people agree with me, but we will make sure that we have, especially the big, you know, the big strokes that are happening in classic.

We're going to definitely talk about on the show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's talk about warbands for a second. That was a thing that I forgot they were doing entirely until I got back in and went, oh, right, they're doing warbands. This is a big deal.

I think maybe what surprised me is that it was in so early. And I shouldn't be surprised because they always do feature stuff in final patches before expansions hit. So it shouldn't be that shocking to me. But when warbands happened... And I logged in and the first four or five characters in my character list were all hanging out in some sort of campfire circle.

I just went, what the hell is going on? It's like Diablo. Am I picking the freaking barbarian to go do Diablo 2 or something? It felt very weird. And I went, oh, right. This is just them saying we also have a little bit of a visual picker. for your war band, but really everything in that whole column of characters, they're all part of your war band.

And I already love it because here's my favorite feature. I go out into the world on an alt. I wanted to get a lock to 70 and I did yesterday. And so that makes, I think I have four seventies, maybe five going into this expansion. Not that I'll use them all, probably only use one or two. But I'm running around with this war lock and

And I'm leveling and I'm doing my thing and I hit 70 and then I'm out to do some quests and I see under the quest, I noticed that the exclamation point above some of these people's heads is a little bit faded out. I'm like, that's weird. I hadn't seen this before. So I would walk up to it and ask the person what the quest was. And sure enough, they're ready to give me the quest.

But down below it says your war band has already done this one.

And the idea is, well, wait, if I was only doing it for Transmog, that's already done. If I'm doing it for rep reasons, that's done. Like, I don't need to do it. And so I won't, or I will because it's fun, or some other reason that you wanted to do it or whatever. But giving me that choice, I mean, that's a small thing, but I really like that. Like, I should be way more excited about it.

Yeah, that's awesome.

Yeah, that's the thing. People who don't do alts, this is a huge gesture. This is saying to you, hey, try some new stuff. And that's really what pushed me to get the lock ready to hurry up and get some of these other characters because I think I am going to be more involved that way.

Not just in like, well, one has professions and he's making bags for everybody or this guy's cooking for everybody or whatever. Those are all still key and important and whatever, but having it feel more like these characters who I inhabit when I'm playing them are all on the same goal sheet. that's meaningful, right?

And then we're sharing stuff like bank stuff and we're sharing rep grind doesn't feel as grindy when all your dudes have it, you know? And then Transmog alone is a massive thing for me. I love the Transmog system in this game. And now everybody gets everything.